The form of the question on a referendum would make a difference in results.
The differences are certainly politically significant. On the Remain/Leave formulation, the independence side dips below its vote share in 2014. On the ‘do you agree’ formulation, it tops 50%. Of course, exactly whether and how wording tips the balance depends on the overall state of public opinion at the time. But the results highlight an important structural feature of referendums as binary choices with much at stake. If voters are evenly divided, as they are currently on independence, then even seemingly innocuous matters such as the question options could change the course of a nation’s history.
To finish, we should acknowledge that experiments like these are better at capturing the likely direction of wording effects than their likely scale. Our experiment simply presented respondents with a question whereas, if a second referendum campaign is anything like as long and hotly contested as the first, then voters will already have given the question extensive thought before they are confronted with the ballot question.
Two points can be made in response, though. One is that the effects seen in Figure 3 occurred despite a decade of arguing about independence. Clearly some people can still be swayed. The other is that the question does not appear for the first time on the ballot paper. Rather, it can define the whole debate. And the terms ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ are so potent that, if they are the frame for ‘indyref2’, things could look very different from the Yes/No battle of ‘indyref1’.